Just a fun gun post. I happen to own both a Marlin 60 and a Ruger 10/22 “tactical.” Both are .22LR rimfire semi-auto rifles. Both tend to be quite affordable, the Marlin much more so than the Ruger, especially when the Ruger is tricked out with folding stock, 25 round magazines, Picatinny rails, red dot sight, etc.

I happen to like both guns quite a bit. I’m not a big fan of “tacticool,” modding out guns with all kinds of synthetic stocks, rails, and accessories. They can certainly add a certain amount of utility to a firearm, but they tend to make them heavier and more unwieldy. I’m just the kind of guy who would freeze at a critical moment trying to decide whether to fire, turn on the laser, use the flashlight, or grab the pistol grip. Having said that, because it kind of came that way from the start, I’ve tricked out my 10/22 to a probably silly degree. Pretty much all my other non-hunting rifles are bone stock.

Having said that, in many ways, I prefer the cheap little Marlin to the Ruger. I think the Marlin’s action is better and smoother. I think it’s slightly more accurate. It weighs about half as much (acknowledging, much of that difference is my own fault). And, rather significantly, I’ve never been able to overrun the action of the Marlin with my finger, while I have done that with the Ruger, especially if the ammo isn’t of the best quality. That is to say, I get a misfeed and the gun jams when trying to fire very quickly in semi-auto. Most of that is probably on the ammo, but I get the impression at times I’ve just flicked my finger faster than the action can work. I’ve never had that happen with the Marlin.

The Ruger has a big advantage in being magazine fed, and holding far more rounds (25 vs. 14 or 15 for the Marlin), if you have BX-25 magazines. Even if one only has the “stock” 10 round cylindrical magazine, it is far easier, and faster, to slap a new magazine in, than it is to reload a 14 round tube, even with speed-loading aids. It is very customizable. The folding stock can be very handy. As an entry-level “tactical” or “sporter” type gun, it’s very inexpensive and easy to handle. With the Marlin, there’s very little around to customize it with, and even adding a scope requires buying special hardware for the rings. Which, is no big deal, but I bet more than one owner has been frustrated to find that awesome new scope he just bought won’t mount on his rifle as it came from the store.

I really don’t think you can go wrong with either gun. I agree with the gentleman in the first video, the Marlin 60 makes a very good first gun. Perhaps not the first gun a child ever shoots – a break action gun might be a more prudent choice – but for a child somewhat experienced with firearms, it is an awesome “first gun” for them to own. My kids have largely learned to shoot on one. Even my more skittish daughters like the light weight and ease of handling the Marlin 60.

Pretty thorough review from the great Hickok45 on both guns:

One gun owner who agrees with my take, though most prefer the 10/22 to the Marlin. I agree with his reasons:

In fact, with regard to the latter, they raze scores a year, at last count. Fairly convenient and easy for the government to do, given that it owns all Church property, since it was seized in the terrible law of 1905.

With respect to one particular Paris parish (say that three times fast), however, the end was a little more ugly than most, which end more with a whimper and the chomping of backhoes than with the anguished cries of broken-hearted parishioners. But Sainte Rita parish had been used by the Institute of the Good Shepherd, a growing Ecclesia Dei community located in France, and still had many souls attached to the Mass and other Sacraments offered there. That is to say, it was a parish more alive and vibrant than most of the French churches being torn down at an awful rate in these days of no faith, who have few, if any, to mourn over them. All to make room for a parking lot, which the new owners of the property judged to be more profitable and useful in Paris in the Year of Our Lord 2016 than a Catholic church. So, Sainte Rita, too, had to go, in spite of its usefulness to souls.

It was a scene of ugliness and brutality. The faithful made what meager defense they could against the mighty power of the state and its armored security forces, stacking pews near the door, standing and kneeling in prayer at the last TLM offered and Rosary prayed in the church. Priests were dragged away, altar boys hustled out, and pious souls, some of them quite elderly, were tossed about like ragdolls. All to make room for a parking lot.

It was a scene we may see repeated all too frequently in the near future, an unbelievably tone-deaf act mere days after a priest had his throat slit by muslims (the “radical” being needlessly repetitive).

The sacking of the church, and the reasons for it, are explained in depth here, but I assume many are already familiar with the situation. I’ll repeat a bit of the backstory and coverage from Mahound for those who may not be:

It was a scene with which all who attend the traditional Latin Mass are perfectly familiar – except, perhaps, for the fact that most of the parishioners were standing. They were standing because the pews had been removed in order to form a barricade at the entrance to the church. A group of police in riot gear and armed with truncheons and tear gas was outside preparing to storm the building. St. Rita has been slated for demolition since October 2015.

As the police began ripping the pews away from the entrance, the faithful, arms locked, broke out in song. The priest continued reciting the ancient prayers. The altar boy remained at his side. A second priest led a small group kneeling beside the sanctuary in the recitation of the Rosary. Some of the faithful prepared handkerchiefs for covering their noses in the case that the police decided to put their canisters of tear gas to use.

As the police stormed the church, the faithful quickly retreated to the sanctuary, encircling the steps to the altar, using their bodies to protect the priest and the altar boy, who were still celebrating Holy Mass. One by one, they were forcefully torn away. The priest who had been praying the Rosary was thrown to the floor and dragged from the sanctuary and out of the church. Fr. Guillaume de Tanoüarn, still engrossed in the celebration of the Divine Liturgy, was pulled from the altar by his vestments and forced outside………

…….And this, precisely one week after another Mass had been invaded, ending with an 86-year-old priest having his throat slit at the altar.

On the sheet metal fence that had been erected outside the Church, someone had sprayed in large letters:

In France, we kill priests and raze churches.

And then next to it, the Greek words of the traditional liturgy, “Kyrie Eleison!”

Lord have mercy on us!

Well, the sexular pagan state gonna be sexular pagans. Their god is the almighty dollar or euro, and a 115 year old church means nothing compared to $3.6 million.

Better even than Mahound’s coverage, some of it originally from One Peter Five, are the scenes captured from the raid in photo and video. They convey better than thousands of words just what went down at Sainte Rita’s:

Sainte Rita

Sainte Rita Fence

Pews as Barricades

Dangerous Old Folks

Sainte Rita, Ready for the Assault

Dragging Priest Away

Mass is over for You

You can see the whole sordid affair, from the breaching of the steel fence originally intended to keep Catholics out (turned into a defense), to the tearing open of the doors, to the removal of the pew barricades, to the violent dragging away of the faithful and even a priest below. The video was shot with a phone or tablet and of course jerks and bounces, but it does reveal the entire affair from start to finish:

The reasons may vary in future, but I doubt this is the last such scene we’ll see enacted in a Catholic parish in the relatively near-term. Heck, they’ve probably played out numerous times in parishes in Iraq and Syria, there just wasn’t a plethora of recording media present, or the recordings were not permitted to survive.

Just a short post of some purty pics I’ve come across lately, both related to Irving. Irving is probably the most Catholic city I’ve ever lived in. Given that I’ve always lived in protestant-land, that may not be saying much, but there is a slightly discernible difference, even as more and more of the Catholics, principally Hispanics, migrate to the sects. That visible Catholicism has several sources, rooted primarily in orthodox belief and practice. It’s the only place we’ve lived where there is a considerable concentration of convicted Catholics living within a mile or two of each other.

It’s hardly Seville at Easter or Siena in 1350, but it’s better than others.

Two pics, one taken by my wife:

Kind of hard to see. If you save it and open it you can blow it up to see better.

This artwork was done by a young lady that used to live with us and went to Mater Dei for a time:

It’s called Two Hearts, One Love. It’s being displayed in an art exhibit in the Diocese of Springfield, Ill.

Rather similar to some of the glorious holy cards from times past you find at Holy Card Heaven:

Speaking of holy cards, I was told the prayer below was composed by a local priest. I haven’t researched to see if that’s true or not, but I did enjoy the prayer, but have been meaning to share it, all the same:

Heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus Thy Son I pray; May the Precious Blood of Jesus wash over me and through me. Let it heal any and every wound and scar, so that the devil may find no purchase in me. Cause it to saturate and fill up my whole being; my heart, soul, mind, and body; my memory, imagination, my past and my present; every fiber of my being, every atom.

Let there remain no part of me untouched by His Precious Blood. Make it flow over and around the altar of my heart on every side. Fill and heal especially the wounds and scars of/caused by____________.

These things I ask of You, Heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus. Jesus, likewise, grant that the light of Your Holy Cross shine in all these same parts of me and my life, that no darkness remain where the devil may hide or have any influence.

Anthony Kennedy peered into his magic 8 ball again, and this time came up maybe kinda sorta Catholic. Or at least, not anti-Catholic. For now. Both he, and liberal stalwart Stephen Breyer, voted to overturn a lower court ruling – judging Obama’s imposition of regulations (not a law!, regulation!) requiring all schools receiving federal funds in the US to allow kids of either sex to use any bathroom they want – to be constitutional.

The matter will almost certainly be reconsidered by the full court again, after the presidential election and the nomination of a replacement justice for Antonin Scalia, rest his soul.

Transgender teens – all one or two thousand of them (maybe -tops) – were of course displeased, because the world must not only revolve around their whims, but we must all go along with their fantasies:

A Virginia school board may temporarily block a student who was born a girl from using the boys’ bathroom while a legal fight over transgender rights proceeds on appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court said on Wednesday.

The case is the first time the fight over transgender bathroom rights has reached the Supreme Court. The subject arrived in the heat of a U.S. presidential election in which the makeup of the court is a central issue.

In a brief order, the country’s highest court put on hold an order from a lower court that had permitted the high school student to use the bathroom of his choice.

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union sued on behalf of Gavin Grimm, 17, to challenge the Gloucester County School Board’s bathroom policy, which requires transgender students to use alternative restroom facilities.

A lawyer for Grimm, Joshua Block, said he and his client were disappointed by the order and “disappointed that Gavin is going to have to begin another school year being stigmatized and separated from his peers as a result of this policy.”

Never mentioned, of course, is the stigma and upset boys may feel in having a husky woman enter their restroom. Even more offensive is the assault on reason, and the left’s increasing demands that all of us share in their dementia. I’m beyond sick of it.

Heck, even Clint Eastwood is sick of it. He just gave an interview strongly lambasting this nature and the cultural marxism that is steadily eating away at its marrow at a rate faster than bone cancer. I can’t recommend you read it, as Clint threw out quite a bit of profanity in his disgust, but I can relate very much to the sentiments he conveyed. We have become a nation of pansies, of crybaby children who can’t stand to hear a mean word said against us, let alone an honest and thoroughgoing criticism. No, that’s not all of us, but a large and increasing number, and it bodes very ill for the future.

This decision, of course, has nothing to do with Target or other private entities and their rules regarding who can use which restroom. That insanity still continues.

So, yes, another issue that puts the 2016 presidential election in stark terms. Unfortunately, those trying to uphold the moral order don’t have the blanket assurance demonrats have, that any justices appointed to the Supreme Court will vote in lockstep liberal orthodoxy on all important matters. Trump, if elected, will hopefully nominate solid conservatives, who will hopefully survive the senate, who will hopefully turn out to not be secret liberals on at least some issues, like Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, etc., etc.

I do not hold the US Constitution as an unassailable paragon of truth and ideal governance. There are many legitimate criticisms to make about this nation and the document upon which its government was founded. But those criticisms stem from a Catholic perspective, primarily, or perhaps a protestant perspective in those cases where protestants have not deviated from the Deposit of Faith. Criticisms from, say, an islamic perspective, are not only false, they are dangerous given the aggressive nature of islam and the command inherent in that false religion to impose the “law of Allah” – sharia – wherever muslims go.

Khizr Khan has made great waves in the presidential election of late from his exchanges with Donald Trump. I think it’s a huge mistake for Trump to stoop down to the level of engaging in tete a tete’s with democrat plants, but I also find the notion that because a man lost a son in service of this country a dozen years ago he is above criticism ludicrous. However, since Khan has chosen to make himself such a public figure in the service of electing Hillary Clinton, his background and beliefs are open to scrutiny. And my goodness, what that scrutiny has revealed.

It’s been a while, but 33 years ago, at least, Khan was a serious advocate of imposing sharia over established national laws in the West, finding all other forms of jurisprudence faulty with regard to what muslims perceive as God’s command:

Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim-American soldier killed in Iraq in 2004 — who lampooned Donald Trump at the Democratic National Convention last week while holding a copy of the U.S. Constitution — has a history of supporting the notion that Islamic Sharia law takes precedence over the Constitution.

Khan attacked Trump for his proposed Muslim immigration ban and questioned whether the nominee had even read the Constitution. Several papers published by Khan, first discovered by Breitbart, found that Khan has a long history of supporting Sharia law over “man-made” Western law…….

……..”The invariable and basic rules of Islamic law are only those prescribed in the Shari’ah,” Khan wrote. “All other juridical works … must always be subordinated to the Shari’ah.”

Khan also praised two infamous Muslim Brotherhood members as sources in his works: Muhammad Hamidullah and Said Ramadan.

Look, pretty much any honest muslim (however many there are, considering taqqiyah) of strong devotion pretty much has to default to this belief. The belief in the ascendancy of sharia over other forms of government/rule of law is so deeply ingrained in islam that only the weakest muslims reject it. In Britain, a majority of muslims now favor the sharia, marking a steady increase in this belief over the past decade or so, which tells us something else: muslims will be more circumspect regarding their true beliefs when they feel weak and surrounded in a given nation/culture, but become more bold as they feel themselves gaining influence.

Which, again, duh. That so many in the West cannot figure this out is not due to any mystery surrounding islam, or its true nature as an aggressive, expansionist religion of conquest, but it is due to the massive loss of faith in the West, and especially in the Church, where few if any have such a strong faith as to actually believe that, say, Catholic Doctrine should form the basis for the orientation of government and a culture’s moral order. I mean, that’s just crazy talk! Religion is something for old people and fearful spinsters to do on Sundays (for now, while they’re allowed), it’s never something to be taken seriously!

The root of the crisis between islam and the West is the West’s crisis of faith. The crisis of faith has created the conditions for the expansion of islam into the West, and indeed made that expansion appear to be something of an imperative to the powers that be. Of course Angela Merkel wants to import a few million more military age males into Germany and the rest of Europe – Europeans aren’t having babies and those Volkswagens aren’t going to build themsevles (yet). The vast majority of Westerners are hard-pressed to develop a strong resistance to this creeping invasion because they lack the strength of conviction to do so, a conviction that must be founded on the True Religion that created Christendom, or the West, in the first place. But that is the one option both the elites, and the great masses of Western people, steadfastly refuse to countenance.

Trying to fight back islam, or even slow its advance, with paeans to liberalism – the western pseudo-religion of the day – is simply doomed to fail. Islam is a false religion, but it’s more true that liberalism, and is thus stronger. Islam proposes a transcendent belief set that sexular paganism cannot hope to match, which explains why disaffected Western youth make up more than a few of ISIS’s military forces. That belief set may be false and even diabolical, but it still rings more true to Western ears who have never learned anything substantive of Christianity than the decadent perversion of present-day liberalism.

I’ve said it many times before, but the Church is being crushed between the immovable object of islam and the irresistible force of secular liberalism. Incredibly, even many in the Church seem unable to comprehend islam’s inherently aggressive nature, acting as useful idiots for its steady penetration deeper and deeper into the inmost fabric of the West. From a worldly standpoint, things look bleak, but, of course, we know that no matter how bad things look, our Blessed Lord will triumph in the end. In fact, His triumph will be all the more impressive for the direness of the situation to be overcome, and the strength of the forces currently ranged against the Camp of the Faithful.

May it please God for that day to come very soon.

In the meantime, I think staunch opposition to continued muslim immigration to this country is one of Donald Trump’s strongest selling points, and one of his sanest policy prescriptions. The muslim scorpion, like Khizr Khan, cannot help but to sting its host, even to death. It’s in its nature.